Aztec, Cibola, Zuni, Estevan Quivara and related gold-like conjecture

A decade ago when I stood by the stone gate tablets at the Zuni ruin of Coronado fame I examined them with interest and gazed across the valley trying to imagine how he must have viewed it, how Estevan and Frey Marcos de Niza must have done. At the time I had no doubt this was near the scene of Estevan's demise.

On the cliff wall of the sacred mesa at Zuni there's a petroglyph depicting a Spaniard being held upside down by his ankles preparatory to being dropped to his death. I don't recall whether I surmised that glyph was the record of one of the captured members of the Estevan lead party, or whether my Zuni-resident companion explained it to me. I can't say whether it's what the Zuni believe it represents.

About all we can be certain of today is that Coronado arrived at Zuni and believed it to be one with Cibola. I was around and about the Zuni Rez for two or three years in all conditions of weather and sunshine and I could never quite imagine how anyone could ever have reported it to resemble gold. For me the view below is more along the lines of how it should have appeared to those Spaniards.

Once we cease believing our ancestors were stupid it opens up a whole range of possibilities concerning what might actually be true, even if a reverence for the truth demands we consider allowing a Cibola into our realities.

One thing I find hard to understand,
is why won't historians, at least consider the fact that that the Spanish had a set of codexes,
that brought them up into this country.
every place my partner and I have been around here, where ancient or traces of an Aztec type culture is concerned, the traces of this previous culture are all but destroyed.
Once in a while we find places where it hasn't and is still intact, but all of the signs are destroyed or are modified to the use of the Spanish.
Sometimes it boggles the mind what was covered up.

Our suspicion is that it was done because the Spanish thought it was pagan and needed to be done away with.

We are at the end of our knowledge in this area an are reaching at this point.
All ideas are welcome.

A decade ago when I stood by the stone gate tablets at the Zuni ruin of Coronado fame I examined them with interest and gazed across the valley trying to imagine how he must have viewed it, how Estevan and Frey Marcos de Niza must have done. At the time I had no doubt this was near the scene of Estevan's demise.

On the cliff wall of the sacred mesa at Zuni there's a petroglyph depicting a Spaniard being held upside down by his ankles preparatory to being dropped to his death. I don't recall whether I surmised that glyph was the record of one of the captured members of the Estevan lead party, or whether my Zuni-resident companion explained it to me. I can't say whether it's what the Zuni believe it represents.

About all we can be certain of today is that Coronado arrived at Zuni and believed it to be one with Cibola. I was around and about the Zuni Rez for two or three years in all conditions of weather and sunshine and I could never quite imagine how anyone could ever have reported it to resemble gold. For me the view below is more along the lines of how it should have appeared to those Spaniards.

Once we cease believing our ancestors were stupid it opens up a whole range of possibilities concerning what might actually be true, even if a reverence for the truth demands we consider allowing a Cibola into our realities.

Yes, so the story goes. Another version is that Estavanico, who was travelling ahead of the Franciscan Marcos de Niza during the 1539 expedition, carved a man-sized cross high on the escarpment just south of the landmark now known as the Kneeling Nun which overlooks the ancient site of the Chino Mine at Santa Rita. When Marcos arrived a few days later, both were led to the mountain known as Santo Nino de Atocha where an exceedingly rich gold mine was shown to them within a cavern in the mountain. A man-sized cross near that mountain still points to the entrance (or, as they say, so the story goes). Everything that followed the 1539 trip was disinformation, including the snipe hunt that Marcos led Coronado on in 1540. Coronado was a useful idiot. Marcos is the key player here. His Mexica-related discovery in 1539 was held back for someone other than the King of Spain, IMHO. Of course, I could be mistaken.

One thing I find hard to understand, is why won't historians, at least consider the fact that that the Spanish had a set of codexes,
that brought them up into this country. every place my partner and I have been around here, where ancient or traces of an Aztec type culture is concerned, the traces of this previous culture are all but destroyed. Once in a while we find places where it hasn't and is still intact, but all of the signs are destroyed or are modified to the use of the Spanish.
Sometimes it boggles the mind what was covered up.

Our suspicion is that it was done because the Spanish thought it was pagan and needed to be done away with.

We are at the end of our knowledge in this area an are reaching at this point.

All ideas are welcome.

Thom

Whichever historians you're referring to probably don't believe it because they haven't seen evidence for it they consider credible. That might mean the evidence doesn't exist, that it doesn't exist in a form allowing authentication, or that it does exist and can be verified, but that by doing so they'd be wandering into academic-career destructive territory. The boundaries aren't so narrow for historians as they are for most scientific disciplines, but among the academian-historians they do exist.

Archeologists tend to have a lot narrower set of fences because of the Erik Von Daneiken-type fudgings of the 1960s-1980s, which were followed by a flood of quasi-archeological tomes making claims of every sort imaginable cutting across every moment and event of human history. Getting a job as an archeologist ain't that easy at the best of times, and it's probably downright impossible for one who's considered a crockpot by his peers. Keep in mind they rely on grants for most of their work.

You might be right and the Spaniards might have taken codices during the conquest. The only thing that comes to mind to cause me to doubt it without doing a lot more thinking on it is the fact it took so many decades after Cortez to begin the tentative steps toward the northern exploration and exploitation.

If you have reason to think they had them, other than by reasoning based on the destruction of the sites it would be interesting to read.

Another version is that Estavanico, who was travelling ahead of the Franciscan Marcos de Niza during the 1539 expedition, carved a man-sized cross high on the escarpment just south of the landmark now known as the Kneeling Nun which overlooks the ancient site of the Chino Mine at Santa Rita. When Marcos arrived a few days later, both were led to the mountain known as Santo Nino de Atocha where an exceedingly rich gold mine was shown to them within a cavern in the mountain.

A man-sized cross near that mountain still points to the entrance (or, as they say, so the story goes). Everything that followed the 1539 trip was disinformation, including the snipe hunt that Marcos led Coronado on in 1540. Coronado was a useful idiot. Marcos is the key player here. His Mexica-related discovery in 1539 was held back for someone other than the King of Spain, IMHO. Of course, I could be mistaken.

Springfield

I don't share the strength of your conviction about what happened concerning Marcos, Estevan, King of Spain et al, but I think there's a sufficient body of evidence around to suggest something fairly fishy happened between the time of the fall of the Aztec and the Coronado expedition. My personal bias leans to believe it happened fairly early and possibly that it involved a sizeable armed party of Spaniards sent northward by Cortez to reconoiter, subdue, whatever.

I'd conjecture further that the Spaniard group encountered Aztecs transporting gold southward from the northern mines, cities, villages, whatever, captured some and persuaded them to lead them back where they'd mined the gold. I have a notion none of this party ever returned with reports of what they found, but they mightn't have existed and if they did exist they might have reported and the information kept secret.

I'm basing the entire supposition on Spanish artifacts of a vintage earlier than Coronado found a long way north of where they have any business being, and evidence where the artifacts were found that they finished their travels on the spot.

But it's all conjecture trying to find reasons to explain physical finds on the ground.

I'm basing the entire supposition on Spanish artifacts of a vintage earlier than Coronado found a long way north of where they have any business being, and evidence where they were the artifacts were found that they finished their travels on the spot.

Can you elaborate at all on these artifacts - the where, when, how, etc... of them? If not, I understand potential reasons for not wanting to or not being able to, but it doesn't hurt to ask

"There is no getting away from a treasure that once fastens upon your mind" - Joseph Conrad (Nostromo)

I'm basing the entire supposition on Spanish artifacts of a vintage earlier than Coronado found a long way north of where they have any business being, and evidence where they were the artifacts were found that they finished their travels on the spot.

Can you elaborate at all on these artifacts - the where, when, how, etc... of them? If not, I understand potential reasons for not wanting to or not being able to, but it doesn't hurt to ask

I can tell you generally that there's been a lot of Spanish armor and surprising weaponry found in a quadrant within 50 miles north and east of the Kneeling Nun over the last 100 years and that a lot of it is a bit too old to fit easily into our current theories of the history of the US southwest.

There's also been some Spanish coinage found up there in 'ancient' Native American sites that suggests the residences were occupied a considerable long while later than the archeologists theorize they should have been if they were politely going to fit into the comfortable histories of the area.

Edit: There's a Hispanic gent in Silver City who's not of the academic breed [runs a car lot] accumulated a fairly massive and convincing body of evidence in his own right about the happenings in those mountains and when it happened. It runs so contrary to current wisdom it's not likely ever to get much exposure, but the academians could learn a lot from him, alone, and quite possibly begin bending their theories around in ways to keep them from having to blush such a heavy shade of red later on.

.... Edit: There's a Hispanic gent in Silver City who's not of the academic breed [runs a car lot] accumulated a fairly massive and convincing body of evidence in his own right about the happenings in those mountains and when it happened. It runs so contrary to current wisdom it's not likely ever to get much exposure, but the academians could learn a lot from him, alone, and quite possibly begin bending their theories around in ways to keep them from having to blush such a heavy shade of red later on.

Rollie is a good man and the group he's affiliated with has a lot of very good information. Consider, however, that Steve H., the man who provided the Codebreakers their source data ca 1990, is deceased and IMO took some of his information to the grave with him. I can tell you that the story told by the Codebreakers is not the same one I originally heard from Harvey's lips in 1985, several years before the advent of the Codebreakers. I've always wondered about that.

.... Edit: There's a Hispanic gent in Silver City who's not of the academic breed [runs a car lot] accumulated a fairly massive and convincing body of evidence in his own right about the happenings in those mountains and when it happened. It runs so contrary to current wisdom it's not likely ever to get much exposure, but the academians could learn a lot from him, alone, and quite possibly begin bending their theories around in ways to keep them from having to blush such a heavy shade of red later on.

Rollie is a good man and the group he's affiliated with has a lot of very good information. Consider, however, that Steve H., the man who provided the Codebreakers their source data ca 1990, is deceased and IMO took some of his information to the grave with him. I can tell you that the story told by the Codebreakers is not the same one I originally heard from Harvey's lips in 1985, several years before the advent of the Codebreakers. I've always wondered about that.

Sounds as though you know the area well. It's good country up that old McKnight Canyon road, leaving the bouncer at the yaller cabin and hiking that trail at the top until a man gets tired enough to just sit and look east all the way to where it runs out.

Incidently, that site I'm looking at up there has a direct relationship with the ancestor of the guy who runs the museum at Pinos. Guess you probably know his mama's not getting around to do her rocking in the museum anymore. Leaves a person a bit at loss for someone to chat with going in there.

Might be worth your while going back and reading what Uncle Jimmy related about the story of old Jake and what happened to him if such things interest you.

.... Sounds as though you know the area well. It's good country up that old McKnight Canyon road, leaving the bouncer at the yaller cabin and hiking that trail at the top until a man gets tired enough to just sit and look east all the way to where it runs out.

Incidently, that site I'm looking at up there has a direct relationship with the ancestor of the guy who runs the museum at Pinos. Guess you probably know his mama's not getting around to do her rocking in the museum anymore. Leaves a person a bit at loss for someone to chat with going in there.

Might be worth your while going back and reading what Uncle Jimmy related about the story of old Jake and what happened to him if such things interest you.

Best to you
J

Yes, I used to run the Black Range extensively in the 70's - Seven Brothers Mountain to Diamond Creek, including many trips up McKnight and environs. Amazing, wonderful country. Always wanted to poke around in Animas Creek on the east side. My searching buddy and I are trying to get it together for a trip over the top and down to the Apache/Cavalry skirmish site there. Would be easier to drive up close from the east side, but it's through the Ladder Ranch, and they say 'no'.

I'm spending most of my time haunting the Pinos Altos Range lately, since I'm now living in PA. There's many lifetimes of exploring to be done around here, and as you know, 50 feet away from where you're standing at any time is a whole new world.

I guess I'd better drag out the Black Range Tales and refresh myself about old Jake ....

.... Sounds as though you know the area well. It's good country up that old McKnight Canyon road, leaving the bouncer at the yaller cabin and hiking that trail at the top until a man gets tired enough to just sit and look east all the way to where it runs out.

Incidently, that site I'm looking at up there has a direct relationship with the ancestor of the guy who runs the museum at Pinos. Guess you probably know his mama's not getting around to do her rocking in the museum anymore. Leaves a person a bit at loss for someone to chat with going in there.

Might be worth your while going back and reading what Uncle Jimmy related about the story of old Jake and what happened to him if such things interest you.

Best to you
J

Yes, I used to run the Black Range extensively in the 70's - Seven Brothers Mountain to Diamond Creek, including many trips up McKnight and environs. Amazing, wonderful country. Always wanted to poke around in Animas Creek on the east side. My searching buddy and I are trying to get it together for a trip over the top and down to the Apache/Cavalry skirmish site there. Would be easier to drive up close from the east side, but it's through the Ladder Ranch, and they say 'no'.

I'm spending most of my time haunting the Pinos Altos Range lately, since I'm now living in PA. There's many lifetimes of exploring to be done around here, and as you know, 50 feet away from where you're standing at any time is a whole new world.

I guess I'd better drag out the Black Range Tales and refresh myself about old Jake ....

That hike down is a killer but it's worse coming back up.

I stayed in there where you're wanting to go long enough to get hungry for human conversation once [which for me is a long time], studying the way Victorio set up that ambush. Led them into that canyon where it was wide enough for flankers, led them until it was so narrow could have been whipped dropping rocks on their heads from the top, but still didn't attack. Where it got steeper and rougher and they had to dismount they they could have put out flankers but it would have been hard and by then they weren't expecting anything and were strung out something awful.

You can see the rock Victorio let them get to before they opened fire. See the rocks no bigger than a man's head with pockmarks all over those bluecoats were trying to hide behind.

You stay in there long enough you can hear the shots and hear the horses and men screaming and smell the black powder smoke. Comes from studying it all too hard too many days in a row.

About halfway down the trail in there's a huge dead tree you can't miss, invites you to lean against it and breathe a while. Don't do it. It's a wild bee tree. You might save yourself carrying in some food by carrying along a collapsible fishing rod. That streams got a billion small trout you can feast on for meals the entire while you're there.

There's some middling gold to be panned about a quarter mile down the main stream after the hard slope breaks, also.

Sometime when you're down this way and if you've never been there the old Mimbres Apache encampment at Ojo Caliente [assuming you can still get in there] would be one you might enjoy. Ruins of the old Apache Agency buildings are still about if you look closely and are worth poking around in. [That's where James Street had his commisary and wrote the magic word in the back of his ledger.] The warm springs run east through a big crack in the rocks maybe 10 feet wide and 50-75 yards long you have to wade through. But while you're wading you can think about the fact you're wading where Mangas, Victorio, Cuchillo Negro, Nana and who knows how many others waded as kids before they got mean and later as adults after they did. The Apache encampment's on the east end of the crack.

All private land but not gated the last time I was in there.

Someone on one of the other treasure forums [seemed to know the east slope area pretty well] mentioned there'd been some Aztec artifacts or markings found in the area around Hillsboro Animas etc. Din't strike me they were deliberately telling an untruth. But I followed M-Canyon high and traced Water Canyon and Priddy Canyon and unnamed others west from their confluences. Followed Animas out to the gate beyond the old line shack downstream.

In hindsight one surprising aspect of Animas and the tribs is the absence of ancient ruins where you'd expect them. Maybe further east there are more. Striking contrast to what you find on the east slope further north. Morgan Canyon has more cave dwellings spattered along that face than a person could explore in a lifetime.

Recent archeologist ponderings on Anasazi migration might have some bearing on the Aztec migration also. Might explain the 1100-1150 civil war, also. Those guys killing one another over religious doctrines before they got around to letting the doctrines kill them has a lot of parallels in European and Middle-Eastern history:

At Kiet Siel, a cliff dwelling now part of Navajo National Monument in northeast Arizona, people sealed the openings of granaries with carefully fitted rock slabs, caulking the edges with a collar of clay. Finally the evacuees blocked the entranceway to the settlement with a large wooden beam.

“It’s pretty clear that these people weren’t freaking out or weren’t in a hurry when they left,” Dr. Dean said.

Ultimately the motivation for the abandonments may lie beyond fossils and artifacts, in the realm of ideology. Imagine trying to explain the 19th-century Mormon migration to Utah with only tree rings and pollen counts.

By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. For more than a century, the established faith was distinguished by multistory “great houses,” with small interior kivas, and by much larger “great kivas” — round, mostly subterranean and covered with a sturdy roof. Originating at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, the formidable temples seem designed to limit access to all but a priestly few.

Though Chaco declined as a regional religious center during the early 1100s, the same architecture spread to the Mesa Verde area. But by the mid 1200s, a different style was also taking hold, with plazas and kivas that were uncovered like amphitheaters — hints, perhaps, of a new openness. At some sites, serving bowls became larger and were frequently decorated with designs, as though intended for a ritual communion. If the pueblo people had left a written history perhaps we would read of the Anasazi equivalent of the Protestant reformation.

But the analogy can’t be pushed too far. The new architecture also included multiwalled edifices — some round, some D-shaped — that might have been chambers for secret rituals.

Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.

Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and attracting the rebellious northerners. Salado polychrome pottery may have been emblematic of another, possibly overlapping cult.

Maybe a fresh way of approaching the whole Aztec thing as a means of eventually getting somewhere new with it all would be trying to figure out exactly who they were through everything we know about them and what was different and similar between the other ancients in the areas up north. Somewhere during the early 1900s the scholarly types rejected the notion they were kinfolk to the Mogollon, Anasazi, Mimbres, etc.

Partly that's due to the pottery, and partly due to the fact their building techniques and religious practices don't bear much similarity to anything found in the north. Then there's the fact none of the northern ruins of any of those folk have ever produced a single gold artifact anyone's admitted to.

So who do we think they were? A separate tribe entirely? The rest of the tribes and cultures in the area share a background going back almost a thousand years and a strong probability they had a more-or-less common language and gene-pool. A person can follow their progress and development forward in time in a lot of ways, including the gradually reduced size of the arrowheads as they killed off all the larger game.

So, assuming the Aztec came from this far north, and no further, were they the product of the same cultural heritage and gene pool as those others, or were they of different stock? If they were the same the only obvious similarities they carried to Mexico with them were the Kachina-type religious icons, unless there are other things that have escaped my notice.

But if they were of a separate stock and co-existed with the northern cultures for a time, why'd they leave so little evidence of themselves to be found? Or how did they?

Those archeologists speculating an evangelical religious reformation of some sort between the same peoples seem to me to offer a possible explanation that makes some sense. There's probably even a way the preoccupation with gold that differentiates the Aztec from the northern folk might be explained somehow in the same matrix of thinking.

But if they came from where we're conjecturing they came from and if we want to know precisely where that was it seems to me trying to make sense their roots before they arrived in Mexico would be a key issue.